A Wedge of Swans

It's impossible to anticipate the End Times if the End Times are literally always here. Interrogate any historical epoch from the point of view of the contemporaries living within it and they will tell you that they, poor lambs, are the ones beset by labors so burdensome and arduous, they certainly will be the ones who are around to experience the failure of mankind, through holocaust of nature or by his own hand. I've talked about this before, but it's probably not a coincidence that the arrival of the winding up of all human existence should happen exactly during the time the people conscious of it should be around to see it. It obviously didn't happen to the previous generations because, well, here we are. And maybe it could happen in the future, but that would mean that our own existence would be as unremarkably forgettable as the previous generation. You know... ole... uh... what's-their-names.

Nope, we're definitely special. Did past humans know suffering? Not like this, no way. I mean, there's us with nuclear bombs and McDonald's and Jesus and That Other Mob with their nuclear bombs and their collectivized agriculture and their taxidermied Lenin puppet. All this hate, all the proxy wars, so many ICBMs, it only takes one button, one mistake, neunundneunzig luftballons, whatever and we're all well-fed, Jesus-loving ashes, man. A bespoke rapture fit for all sizes. There's no way the world makes it past 1985.

That, of course, was just the eschatology I was born into. Then we had this weird period of about 10 years where we weren't sure what to be afraid of, so we decided to try to tear ourselves apart through less permanent methods in one of history's great spasms of drama-jones-ing. The trauma of 9/11, some 17 years after the fact now, seems to have simply reactivated the comfortable old blood-and-soil existential terror we all remembered so fondly from our gibbering, shaking youths.

Apocalypse is an oft-sung historical refrain, of course, sometimes with a better tune. In 1755, a massive earthquake-tsunami-firestorm trifecta nearly stripped the world of any evidence that Lisbon ever existed, all in the space of a day. God had tried to shake us off this earth, the way a dog shakes off fleas. But of course the joke's on Him, because anyone with a dog will know you don't get rid of fleas by shaking. That's fucking stupid. No, you have to go to the veterinarian and get one of those dropper things of flea-icidal poisonous chemicals that has to be administered intentionally in order to render the entire system inhospitable to the continued inhabitation by fleas. Let's see God try something as ambitious as THAT, haha.

The aftermath of 1755 was that all of European Enlightenment thought, art and politics were bent toward its gravity for a time, warping some and straightening out others. But that was a singular event with a tangible outcome, like Hurricane Katrina but taken seriously by the people in charge of responding to it. Are we convinced we're living in the End Times right now? Of course we are. Every generation is a generation of narcissists. We are not special in this regard. If we accept that actual physical survival of the earth and its peoples aren't actually at stake here,* then the stakes are... what?

We won't really know until we see the art and philosophy that comes out of it, I guess. Global warming, the lingering threat of cross-cultural religious terrorism, the growing divide of rich and poor, the rebirth of anti-globalist struggle within and between nations... I'm not saying it's all worth it if we get a Candide out of it, I'm just suggesting it will tell us who we are as a people if we don't.

A quick check of where we're at now and I see we're producing both Hamilton and whatever the fuck that kabuki show is that Sean Hannity puts on every night. Yeah, it's just too early to tell.

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*Unless somehow the anti-vaccination assholes somehow win. Then everyone definitely dies.